How Channing Tatum Ended Up Starring in the Craziest TV Show of 2017

Any story about Comrade Detective needs to begin with a lengthy preamble about what Comrade Detective actually is. The six-episode comedy—which premieres its first season on Amazon on Friday—is described as an old Romanian cop show, produced during the height of the Cold War as pro-communist propaganda. The plot follows two cops (Florin Piersic Jr. and Corneliu Ulici) tracking a sinister killer who runs around in a Ronald Reagan mask, undermining the ideals of communism. In introductory sequences before each episode, Channing Tatum and Jon Ronson praise Comrade Detective as a long-lost TV classic, beloved by aficionados like Stanley Kubrick.

Except none of that is true. Comrade Detective is a new show dressed up like an old one. Recently produced in Romania with a Romanian cast (and deliberately comedic), Comrade Detective’s Romanian dialogue has been dubbed over by an all-star cast that includes Tatum, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Nick Offerman, Jenny Slate, Mahershala Ali, Chloë Sevigny, Jake Johnson, and Kim Basinger, to name a few.

It’s a lot to wrap your head around—but when Comrade Detective clicks, you’ll find it as compulsively binge-watchable as any good crime show (though a good deal funnier). In an era of great TV, it’s a delight to see something as singularly strange as Comrade Detective distinguish itself in a crowded landscape.

So how did Comrade Detective come together? I talked to Channing Tatum, who also serves as executive producer, about this very unique project.

Comrade Detective is about as high-concept as a TV show can get. How did you first come to this material—let alone wrap your head around it?I was meeting with [Comrade Detective creators] Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka, and I said something like, "What’s one of your bad ideas? What’s the worst idea you guys have?" And they pitched me this. And we made it. [laughs] I don’t know. All of us have a love for '80s and '90s TV shows and movies, and every single one of those great action movies in the '80s and '90s had, like, a Russian bad guy. And they taught me that behind the Iron Curtain, they were making TV shows and movies where Americans were the bad guys. And that got a good old giggle out of pretty much all of us. And of course! I don’t know why I’d never thought of it before, but of course they were. And we thought there was a lot of room for comedy there.

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Have you actually seen any of those old Iron Curtain propaganda shows?We really wanted to use one of the real shows. And ultimately, we couldn’t get one. They wouldn’t let us use them. So someone just said, "Well… How much would it cost to just go and make our own?" So we did. They went over to Romania and shot the whole show. I didn’t know how all-out they were going to go. If they would have come back with some random, arbitrary footage, I wouldn’t have been surprised. They were never going to do that—but I didn’t know what they were gonna come back with. It was Romania with Romanian actors. And these guys over there are some of the best actors you’ve ever seen. For them to completely understand the tone—and still care enough, even knowing they were going to be dubbed over—to still go hard and make it great. I’m such a fan, man. They probably didn’t send you the non-dubbed version, huh?

No, just the dubbed.I was reluctant to dub them because they did such a good job. They were so, so, so good. Honestly, I like the Romanian version more than our dubbed version, so I hope people also get the chance to watch that. In Romania, they’re just gonna air the Romanian version. They’re not gonna have our dumb voices. [laughs] And I’m gonna try to make Amazon put the Romanian version up as well.

“I said something like, ‘What’s one of your bad ideas? What’s the worst idea you guys have?’ And they pitched me this. And we made it.”

So many of the jokes are about the reductive American stereotypes in Comrade Detective: Cowboy hats, Pepsi, Jordache jeans. It seems ridiculous—and then you think about how Russians were portrayed in Rocky IV or Red Dawn…That’s what we grew up thinking! And how much of that actually went into your psyche and your opinions of Russian people? Across the world, in propaganda and entertainment, you’re swayed by your culture, and art, and comedy. It all affects you.

And that’s just as true from the opposite perspective.Definitely. There’s a scene [in Comrade Detective] where they explain the point of Monopoly [from a Communist perspective], and it’s: "Take all the land, and all the money…and let your neighbors starve." And I was like, "Oh, my God! I’ve never thought of it that way."

Comrade Detective is coming out at a time when Russia is very, very much in the news. Did you always know it was going to be so topical?You know… I don’t think that we planned it. I can’t say that I planned that. I guess things really haven’t changed all that much. Capitalism still is an issue, and communistic ideals…they’re all very worldly ideas that are out there, and that people have to deal with every day. I do think that [Comrade Detective] is done in a way that I really enjoyed, because I love comedy when it’s actually about something.

It’s just so interesting that—in a show purportedly made decades ago—there are still references that would have been timely then, and are still timely today. There are gags about Donald Trump, and whether health care is a human right…Yeah. I hope it’s done in a fun way that’s also thought-provoking. Throughout time, you know what you know because that’s what you were given growing up. Now we have so much information that it’s almost disinformation. [laughs] Who knows what things are going to turn into in the future? But I do know that [Comrade Detective] is really fun and actually very smart.

Every episode of Comrade Detective ends with a "To be continued"—including the finale. Are you planning to make any more?You know, that’s all up to the audience—if they watch it and they like it. It was fun for us to go and make, so…

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